It’s a verdict that gives ‘justice delayed’ a whole new definition. Still, after 15 years, 14,000 pages of evidence, a 10,000-page charge sheet and a 3000-page sentence, 100 people will pay for the brutal murder of 257 in the Bombay blasts of 1993: twelve with their lives, others with life sentences and varying jail terms.Blood for blood, in the cold-blooded language of terrorism. And yet, it seems, not every drop has been accounted for. “While the blast convicts have got capital punishment, those who killed innocent Muslims in the Mumbai riots are free,” says Abdusatar Yusuf Sheikh, senior secretary of the All India Personal Law Board.

This, of course, is an absurd argument. Fortunately for us all, the law is not an exercise in tit-for-tat, which is why one crime cannot possibly justify another. Nevertheless, despite what Ujwal Nikam, public prosecutor in the Bombay Blasts trial, will have us believe, these two are irrevocably linked. Indeed, many of the key conspirators in the bombings were victims of the deadly pogrom that gutted Mumbai in December 1992 and January 1993.

They were not the only ones. About 900 citizens were killed in the blood bath after the demolition of the Babri Masjid — 275 Hindus, 575 Muslims — nearly three times the toll of the bombs that followed them. The great majority were victims of stabbing, while others succumbed to arson, mob violence and shootouts — not the cold, impersonal genocide of terrorism, but the vindictive, visceral violence of loathing, the kind that turns neighbours into butchers and friends into murderers. Worse, 356 others — mostly Muslims — were actually killed in police firing by trigger-happy protectors of the law, with the active support of several political leaders.

... contd.